I Watched Every Episode of the CW's Riverdale

And all I got out of it was enough material to write a review on Substack.

A few weeks ago, I finished watching all seven seasons of the CW’s Riverdale. Why I started doing this, I can’t tell you. Why I finished, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the sunk cost fallacy. Maybe it’s a morbid curiosity at what gets passed off for entertainment these days. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. Whatever the reason, I’m now in the 99th percentile of Riverdale viewers worldwide and I’ve spent 117 hours watching a show that bravely answers the question: What if you jumped the shark, but with horny teens?

The premise of Riverdale is that you can take the names and likenesses of the characters of the Archie Comics universe — who are firmly rooted in the aesthetics and nostalgia of the 1950s — and append them onto the characters of a generic modern teen drama. That which was once Middle American jock Archie Andrews is now, respectively, a musician, a gangster, a prisoner, a boxer, a soldier, a teacher, a firefighter, a miner, a vigilante, a theater kid, and a beatnik. Girl next door Betty Cooper is a psychopath and a dominatrix. Punchline fodder Jughead Jones is a brooding gang leader and a self-important iconoclast. Primadonna Veronica Lodge is a girlboss. And everyone — I mean everyone — Is. Constantly. Fucking. It doesn’t matter who or whom, or what gender combo or sexual orientation the characters have been established as, or how many people are involved, or whether it even makes sense for them to know each other. If you can name ’em, they’ve boned.

If you asked me to summarize the plot of Riverdale, I would tell you the following:

It’s a show about the Archie Comics characters solving the murder of one of their classmates. And also, they have sex with each other. And then a serial killer starts terrorizing Riverdale. And they have sex with each other. A board game starts making people kill themselves. And they have sex with each other. An organ-harvesting cult moves into town. And they have sex with each other. Jughead is nearly murdered. And they have sex with each other. Veronica’s dad hatches a cartoonish plot to steal the town’s precious minerals. And they have sex with each other. Aliens start abducting women. And they have sex with each other. For a few episodes, they have sex with each other in an alternate universe. And when they get back to reality, they all have superpowers (and sex with each other). They try to stop a warlock from taking over Riverdale, but the town gets destroyed, so they all time travel back to 1955 and they solve racism by having sex with each other. Also, there’s a lot of gang warfare and Archie is groomed by his music teacher. And every once in a while, they put on a musical. Did I mention they have sex with each other?

You might get the idea that they have a lot of sex with each other. This is subtle, but it’s key. The primary reason that Riverdale’s showrunner, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, even pitched the series in the first place is that he wanted to see the Archie characters bone. In 2003, he wrote a stage play called Archie’s Weird Fantasy, in which Archie — you guessed it — has sex with a serial killer. The play received a cease-and-desist order from Archie Comics the day it was supposed to premiere, but everything seems to have cooled off by 2014 when Aguirre-Sacasa was made chief creative officer of the Archie brand.

The second apparent reason Aguirre-Sacasa wanted to make Riverdale is that he likes pop music and wanted to see it performed on TV. This is why the Riverdale soundtrack is a whopping 1,085 tracks long, and there’s at least one episode per season where the Archie gang produces a musical and performs somewhere around a dozen songs in full: a tradition that continued through the end of the series even though the musical episodes were consistently rated the lowest by fans and critics. One non-musical episode with seven full song performances, “Chapter Ninety-One: The Return of the Pussycats” (rated 4.3/10 on IMDB), was originally supposed to be a pilot for a musical spinoff series about Josie and the Pussycats, but the series never aired ostensibly because the episode was so poorly received.

I suspect it is because so much of the show’s budget was spent on music rights, performances, and choreography that the network didn’t have enough money left over to hire writers or creative talent. At least, that’s the best explanation I can surmise for why the show is so bad.

If you want an extended explanation of why Riverdale is so bad, keep on reading. Otherwise, just take a look at the following shot from an episode in season six in which supporting character Cheryl Blossom — who at this point in the series has magical powers — resurrects Riverdale’s first-born children after they were cursed dead by a warlock:

No, this isn’t the ghost scene from Star Wars.

In all fairness, it doesn’t get this bad until well into the series. Season one is probably better than your average teen drama, since the plot is at least coherent and the dialogue is semi-clever. Two through four are tolerable, and five through seven are a long slog. Once you get to this point, plot lines are somehow both repetitive and increasingly contrived. Continuity is routinely ignored. Characterizations that were built up for years are thrown out whenever the writers decide they’re inconvenient. At times, the dialogue sounds like it was lifted from the manifesto of an especially preppy school shooter. To wit:

• An attempt is made on Archie’s life at least once per season. By seasons five and six, this is almost once per episode.

• For most of the series, Veronica and Archie are locked in an on-again, off-again feud with Veronica’s father, Hiram Lodge. This ends in season six when Hiram plants a bomb in Archie’s house and Veronica has him assassinated.

• Although there is a seven-year time gap between seasons four and five, the calendar only progresses by one year.

• Characters are revealed to be gay or bi seemingly at random. This includes Archie’s mom, Archie’s uncle, and the town sheriff. In season seven it is strongly suggested that Archie has sex with his male best friend Reggie Mantle.

• Half the supporting characters are written off the show with minimal explanation, including Jughead and Cheryl’s families.

• When the writers want characters to behave in ways that don’t make sense, they explain it away by having them brainwashed by overpowered villains.

• In seasons five and six, Veronica takes to calling people “little bitch” for no apparent reason. Throughout the series, Veronica and Cheryl both speak like Elizabethan nobility.

• In the series finale, every character’s ultimate fate is revealed and they all die. Archie moves to California and marries someone we’ve never seen before. Jughead and Betty both die alone. Veronica becomes a generic businesswoman. Everyone else either lives in bliss and dies of old age or gets brutally murdered.

At Riverdale’s peak, during season two, there was an average of 2.12 million viewers per episode. By season six, it was just 460,000. Somehow, however, it just kept going. Everyone knew it was bad and it kept going. Actors quit out of embarrassment and it kept going. The show lost whatever reason it had to exist and it kept going.

That might be understandable if it was still pulling in a sizeable audience up until the end. ABC’s Lost famously lost the plot a few seasons in when the writers started adding storylines about nuclear bombs and time travel and extended flashbacks about how characters got their tattoos. But it kept going anyway because it had more than 10 million viewers per episode. Riverdale had one-twentieth of that and it lasted a season longer.

It’s unclear why that is. You wouldn’t think it would be in the network’s interest to sign a contract with someone as incompetent as Aguirre-Sacasa. But evidently that’s what happened. Maybe there weren’t any better shows they could have aired. Maybe there are enough diehard Riverdale fans out there that it was still worth it. Maybe they needed a front to launder money. Maybe Roberto had blackmail material on the CW executives. Based on the evidence, I’d say the latter is the most likely.

It pains me to say I have no idea what this tells us about anything. That’s not a satisfying way to end a review — I know — but then again, nothing about Riverdale was satisfying. It just sort of existed without regard for the people who watched it, and then one day, when the writers didn’t want to write anymore, they just stopped writing and it stopped existing. Whether that’s good or bad, I can’t tell. The world probably would have been a better place if something else had taken over the airwaves after season one, but on the other hand, nobody was forced to watch Riverdale, so who really cares? Maybe the lesson here is that the people who did choose to watch Riverdale — and I suppose this includes myself — got exactly what they deserve. What the hell were you expecting? Citizen Kane?

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